⬜ Connecticut is a trend
Influencers embrace the suburbs.
Kyle Chayka: Emily Sundberg’s profile of the influencer Paige Lorenze in NYmag points to an irrefutable fact: Connecticut is trending. Lorenze moved from Soho to Southport, CT, and hasn’t looked back. Her bucolic content — horse riding, leaf peeping, seasonal Starbucks drinks — is booming. Her spinoff streetwear brand Dairy Boy benefits from the CT aura of leafy driveways, luxury pick-up trucks, and home tennis courts. Add to that the ongoing revival of Gilmore Girls, streaming on Netflix, and the TikTok-ification of WASP aesthetics via “coastal grandmother” and “quiet luxury” and what you get is the revenge of the Nutmeg State.
I grew up in New Milford, CT, outside of the NYC commuting radius, in the middle of the woods. There was nothing cool about it; the highlight of my high-school years was a 24-hour Starbucks up the highway in Danbury. Thus I was shocked when an extremely stylish, could-be-an-influencer friend of mine posted a selfie at the Elephant’s Trunk flea market in New Milford, which apparently brands itself as the largest in New England. She thought it was great. Last week, a meme account called @iamthirtyaf with 3.3 million followers dropped off some physical swag at the downtown New Milford gazebo (which is hilariously pictured on the town flag) because it was the inspiration for the fictional setting of Gilmore Girls, Stars Hollow.
This makes my skin crawl, the specter of the internet haunting my hometown, when literally anywhere else would be more interesting. Leave it to be mediocre in peace! And yet I harbor a kind of hope: Is it possible the poor children of New Milford today are growing up with more internet clout and content capital than I had? (Those are the only sources of 21st-century success, after all.) Maybe the cheap stretches of Connecticut are the new Catskills. If so, bring on the minimalist cabin hotels.
The endless gentrification of Brooklyn stretching into Sunset Park and Kensington has left me wondering when its restless residents will realize that the tri-state suburbs are cheaper and closer to Manhattan. There are houses in Westport, CT, minutes away from Metro North that cost less than a two-bedroom condo in Bed Stuy. You walk 15 minutes to the subway and take the train for the better part of an hour to get to Union Square? Bro you already live in Connecticut.
Nate Gallant: Connecticut is a place of insides and outsides. For me, growing up in the New Haven suburbs, I felt like I was on the outside of New York. My suburban life of mall parking lots and fast food felt farther away from "the City's" cultural centrality than the actual 1.5-hour train ride would suggest.
Sure, New Haven had a bar where you could still smoke inside, get carded very irregularly, and get into arguments with obnoxious Yalies wearing suede Clarks about Aldous Huxley and Joseph Campbell. The famous pizza is still good (Ernie's in Westville is better than Sally's or Pepes, for the record). And it has room for my favorite used bookstore of all time. But Yale's influence on the city meant that most fun or free spaces in the city were gradually turned into Urban Outfitters, H&R Blocks, and Chipotle rip-offs.
Yet for those on the outside of Connecticut, ‘90s and early-2000s pop culture perpetuated a very different image of the state, one that you could perhaps only consume properly if you lived somewhere else. Gilmore Girls. Ivy League vibes. East Egg money on the fringes of Gossip Girl or 30 Rock episodes. "My estate in —.” For those decamping New York City for their fated suburban life, and who for whatever reason didn't choose Westchester, there were Fairfield County and preppy boarding-school fantasies. I really didn't encounter any of this until I was at college in the midwest and saw the kinds of gilded fantasies that had been projected upon what I felt was the most boring place I could imagine.
I have been nearly everywhere in the state, first while working for a courier service in high school, then canvassing for hipster congresswoman Rosa Delauro, and later while driving aimlessly during early lockdown. But I never saw Stars Hollow among the now celebrity-dotted towns of Litchfield county. (I did find the Manolo Blahnik family dairy farm — pretty good ice cream) An actual Connecticut does exist, but it’s better observed in Ocean Vuong’s fiction, set in immigrant Hartford, or by pointing to the laws in its affluent exurbs preventing affordable housing. As it was in the 20th century, Connecticut is still the dream of capital, flowing eastward from downtown skyscrapers and reproducing itself along highways into bedroom communities. Connecticut is always in reference to something else.
It's been interesting to read this one, and I have mixed feelings about this shift, but there is an underrated aspect that I think is worth mentioning, and that is how *pleasant* it is/can be. I'll elaborate but it might be worth giving some context first.
I grew up in CT as well, but from a pretty typical working/middle class suburb right in-between Hartford and New Haven. It had a lot going for it, but it wasn't cool or pretty.
I went to Hoboken for school and then moved to NYC after - a stint on W15th street for a bit and then a decade in Willyburg, both off the Bedford stop and the less-hip but infinitely more cool Graham ave stop. When it came time to move out of the city after getting married in 2017, my wife and I gravitated towards upper Westchester since it was still commutable to our jobs in the city while being a lot more woodsy. Our search centered around Pound Ridge, mostly, and after hopping around 3-6 houses to see we'd spend the rest of the day hiking in the hills or pottering around a small town and driving twisty roads. It was nice.
The search dragged on for close to a year and we expanded into CT - my wife had no feelings about this but it seemed unthinkable to me, since I thought I left that place. But we found it - the perfect midcentury ranch on a quiet street in North Stamford, right across the border from Pound Ridge and New Canaan (literally on the intersection of the town lines) with a huge pool and facing a pond. And we spent the next 3 years there, had a baby there, spent 2020 and 2021 not cooped up in an apartment but instead going on nature walks or snooze cruises past iconic midcentury architecture and bucolic winding roads or swimming or cooking pizzas outside in an Ooni.
And that is what I think is worth mentioning about that upper Westchester / lower Fairfield county area. Sure it's rich and probably full of wankers but everything is kept SO nice that it's a really, really pleasant place to be. The secondhand effects of it are very real. It was comforting knowing my child was going to grow up expecting things to be kept nice - not full of litter and debris and cracked roads and sidewalks. A place with mature growth trees and landscaping that is oriented around the changing seasons. It's the way my wife grew up in a small suburb in the outskirts of north London, and it's something I didn't recognize I missed out on in my Very Normal American Town but appreciated immediately once I had it close.
So for a group of people that are obsessed with Pretty Things (even if they're more focused on how it looks in a photo and not holistically) and get bummed that the city just Isn't Pretty, I can see the appeal the first time they rent a car and hit the road up there. I can't blame them!
A job change for my wife to Tokyo meant selling that house in late 2021, and while this city is very, very pleasant I do still think about it often even a few years later and the change in perspective it gave me. Hence all of the words.
Just came across this—as a fellow NMHS grad who has since moved on but who still has family in town, I’ve never once heard the historic structure on the green (now depicted on the town flag) referred to as anything other than “the bandstand.” It may fit the definition of a gazebo, and the ersatz copy of it on “Gilmore Girls” might have been called one, but no one in New Milford uses that label.